InfluxData scores $35 million Series C to expand time series database business

In a world where sensors are capturing ever-increasing amounts of data, being able to collect that high volume and measure it over time becomes increasingly important. InfluxData, the startup built on top of the open source time series database platform, announced it has received a $35 million Series C investment today led by Sapphire Ventures, the investment arm of enterprise software giant, SAP.

Existing investors Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures and new investor Harmony Partners also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to almost $60 million.

Time series databases, as the name implies, allow companies to capture and measure data rapidly and see how it trends over time. Company CTO Paul Dix saw the need for time series tools and began building the underlying open source tool kit in 2014. It was immediately popular on Github, says CEO Evan Kaplan. Today there are 120,000 sites running Influx in open source and 400 enterprise customers using the platform.

While developers can build a time series application using Influx’s tools, if it requires enterprise scale, security and availability; they will need to buy the commercial version of the product. “If you get serious about running Influx in large production, you have to buy the closed source [version of the product],” Kaplan said.

While the commercial product has been available for just 18 months, the company has been able to attract a who’s who of enterprise brands as customers including IBM, SAP, Cisco, PayPal, Tesla and Siemens.

Sapphire partner Anders Ranum says his firm saw an emerging market opportunity and made the investment to take advantage of it. “Development teams are facing steep barriers in capturing and analyzing all the data available to them in making smart decisions for their business given new capabilities in machine learning, internet of things and artificial intelligence,” Ranum said in a statement. He believes that time series tooling can help.

The company currently has 80 employees, but plans to double that number in the coming year with the help of today’s investment and the growth of the product. As part of today’s investment Sapphire’s Ranum will be joining the Influx Board of Directors.